With a new cage season upon us, SDSU fans have been infected with a bit of basketball fever.

This time of year 115 years ago in these parts, another fever was in the air.

Smallpox.

During the early years, that deadly, disfiguring disease and other discomforts waxed and waned out here on the flatlands. 

Caring for victims and keeping the disease in check was up to the county’s few physicians, the Brookings County commissioners and a three-member Board of Health.

In the handwritten minutes of the commission meetings in 1902 are references to some of what was taking place during the smallpox outbreaks.

For the poor, and there were many, there were county-paid expenses for disinfectants and money to pay the experts who fumigated homes. 

That process started after the house was vacated and sealed. A washtub was placed in the center of the largest ground floor room with about two inches of water in it. Sulfur in a pie pan was lit and the pan floated on the tub’s water. 

Maybe sulfur fumes worked. Probably they didn’t.

Poole’s Livery got $10 for “use of team of horses needed in fumigating,” probably for use by fumigators and to convey patients to the county “pest house,” the location of which varied through the years. One was located about where Medary Acres is today. 

The livery barns were also hired to deliver medicines, clean sheets and blankets, and groceries, to the pest house. County records show Bonesteel & Stowe Meat Market was paid $3 for “meat for the pest house.” Sussex and Ray billed the county for “milk for the pest house, $34.34.” 

The Farmers Shipping Association dumped $129.35 of coal down the pest house chute.

Mrs. C.L. Mickelson sold two bed quilts to the county for pest house patients. She submitted a bill of $5, but commissioners approved only $2.50. All clothing and bedding in the pest house had to be burned after use.

Doctors who visited patients in rural areas packed extra clothing in their buggies. After visiting the patients, they changed into the spare set and burned the clothing they arrived in.

Patients confined to the pest house were the most critically ill. Their family members, possibly exposed to the disease, were quarantined in the family home and a sign was hung on the door to warn visitors. Imagine parents who were ordered to send their suffering young children to spend hours alone in the pest house with other ill strangers.

To discourage family members from sneaking out of the house, guards like Ed Sorenson and Ben Larson were hired. Ed and Ben earned $40 each one month in 1902 to “insure quarantine.”

Angels emerged. 

Like Jessie Young, who risked pain and death to spend time in the pest house feeding the ill, dispensing medication, comforting them, banking the fire, handling the messes and giving hope. The commissioners one month approved $105 to Jessie for his pest house vigils. A good day’s pay in 1902 was $3.

For poor families, the county hired gravediggers and bought $15 coffins from the Brookings Furniture Company then in the Masonic Building still at the corner of Main Avenue and Third Street. 

A minister got $2 in county funds to recite graveside prayers for those who departed this world alone, their bodies placed in cheap coffins that were loaded on rattling wagons for the long, lonely trip up the Main Avenue hill to Eighth Street South, then west to Greenwood Cemetery, all without the escort of tearful family members who mourned together from afar, confined to their home, under strict quarantine.

Think about those sad, dreary pest house days, and enjoy this week’s enjoyable and healthy basketball fever. 

If you’d like to comment, email the author at cfcecil@swiftel.net.